PHOENIX — Maricopa County Recorder Justin Heap has referred more than 200 registered voters who may not be U.S. citizens to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office after a top state prosecutor threatened Heap with legal action.
Heap’s office in March sent Maricopa County prosecutors the names of 207 registered voters, including 60 who have cast ballots in prior elections, after the federal Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements database flagged them as being noncitizens.
Heap’s office used the SAVE system, which has returned widespread errors in other states, to determine citizenship for tens of thousands of registered voters affected by a systemic database problem dating back two decades.
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However, Heap did not provide state prosecutors with the list until May 22, two months later. Richie Taylor, a spokesperson for Attorney General Kris Mayes, told ABC15 in a statement that Heap should have immediately referred the cases as required by law.
“Instead, he played games and only relented when threatened with legal action by Attorney General Mayes,” he said. “The integrity of Arizona’s elections is too important for this type of gamesmanship.”
State prosecutors will review and investigate the referrals, Taylor said.
Heap refused to send names
Mayes’ office first asked for the names in March 2 email. According to copies of correspondence between Mayes’ office and the recorder, Heap refused for months to provide the names, saying he would not do so until after the November election.
“Our elections are far too important for you to refuse to provide the names of suspected noncitizen voters,” Nicholas Klingerman, the head of the criminal division, told Heap in a May 20 letter.
He told Heap the AG’s office would “take all appropriate steps to ensure you faithfully execute Arizona’s laws” if he didn’t provide the names in the next two days.
He did.
State law requires county recorders to cancel a voter’s registration if they confirm the person is not a U.S. citizen and then notify both the county attorney and attorney general. First, recorders must send the voter a notice giving them 35 days to provide proof of citizenship.
But in an April 10 letter to Klingerman, Heap said he had instead moved the voters to “not eligible” status and notified them they had until 7 p.m. on Election Day in November to provide proof of citizenship. Because he had not canceled their registrations, Heap wrote, he was not required to send the names to the Attorney General’s Office.
The letter is dated nearly three weeks after Heap’s office sent the 207 names to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.
“Because these individuals are associated with the well-documented MVD-related issue, it is important to provide every reasonable opportunity to verify citizenship before initiating cancellation,” Heap wrote, pointing to the Elections Procedures Manual, a document the Arizona secretary of state publishes to ensure the consistency of election practices statewide.
However, the EPM instructs recorders to send registered voters the 35-day notice if they confirm they are not citizens. The manual does not have guidelines on how to use the SAVE system for what's called “list maintenance” — the upkeep of voter rolls.
Secretary of State Adrian Fontes told ABC15 earlier in May that county recorders have access to the SAVE system as a tool to verify the citizenship of people registering to vote.
According to emails obtained in a public records request, Heap’s office signed a legal agreement with the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services for a separate SAVE account that they could use for both voter registration and list maintenance purposes.
“We do a careful job in our list maintenance,” Fontes said. “But I'd be interested to learn more about how Maricopa County is using it for that.”
MVD issue stretched back two decades
Heap’s office has refused multiple times to answer ABC15’s questions about the 207 voters in question.
They are among 83,000 registered voters in the county affected by a decadeslong coding error in an Arizona Motor Vehicle Division database that incorrectly marked them as having provided proof of citizenship.
The problem was discovered shortly before the 2024 November election. Heap in June 2025 sent the affected voters letters instructing them to provide proof of citizenship within 90 days or have their registration changed to federal-only status.
Heap said in a statement in February that his office ran the records of more than 61,681 of those voters through the SAVE database, which flagged 137 as non-citizens and confirmed citizenship for 58,782.
The status of the remaining 2,762 people is not clear, and Heap’s office has not responded to questions about them.
Heap’s office sent another 70 names, for a total of 207, to Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell’s Office on March 23.
Her office said Wednesday the investigation is still ongoing and that no charges have been filed yet.
